This invention relates to pasta packaging and specifically to an apparatus for stacking strips of lasagne in overlapping layers or shingles for rapid packaging in bundles of a preselected size.
In conventional assembly line processing of relatively large sized pasta, such as lasagne, strips of processed pasta are transported at relatively high speeds along a conveyor belt to a packaging station where a worker manually counts and stacks the strips into bundles and loads the bundles into a packaging machine for further processing. In known conveyor belts, it is necessary for the worker to separately pick up each individual pasta strip, stack the strips together manually and load the assembled bundles into the packaging machine. The high conveyor speeds employed in conventional lines generally exceed the ability of the work, and as a result, it is customary to remove large batches of noodles in advance of the worker. Thus conventional lines have the disadvantage of being discontinuous, at least to some extent, and of requiring considerable manual handling of the noodles.